Smartphones will officially overtake feature phones in the mobile market this year, according to IDC.

While it might seem as though feature phones have been on the decline for a while, 2013 is expected to mark the first time smartphones rule the market on an annual basis, IDC said, tipping lower prices and 4G access as part of the reason behind the smartphone bump.

Vendors are expected to ship 918.6 million smartphones this year  50.1 percent of all mobile phone shipments worldwide, IDC said. By the end of 2017, the company forecasts 1.5 billion smartphones shipped globally.

While the U.S. is a leading force in smartphone demand, emerging markets like China, Brazil, and India are expected to help push the market further. As the populous nations' economies grow, so does their interest in buying smartphones. China, which overtook the U.S. last year as the global leader in smartphone shipments, is at the forefront of this shift.

"While we don't expect China's smartphone growth to maintain the pace of a runaway train as it has over the last two years, there continue to be big drivers to keep the market growing as it leads the way to ever-lower smartphone prices and the country's transition to 4G networks," Melissa Chau, senior research manager for IDC Asia/Pacific, said in a statement.

Even as China matures, an enormous untapped potential remains in other emerging markets like India. Less than half of all phone shipments in India by 2017 will be smartphones, but it's still the world's third-largest market, Chau said.

Brazil also carries a lot of potential in the market, though its citizens have yet to ditch their feature phones for something shinier.

"The smartphone tide is turning in Brazil though," Bruno Freitas, consumer devices research manager for IDC Brazil, said in a statement, adding that wireless service providers and the government have already laid the groundwork for "a strong smartphone foundation that mobile phone manufacturers can build upon."

Among IDC's forecast of the top five countries expecting high smartphone shipments over the next four years are the U.K. and Japan, both of which are expected to carry a small percentage of the 2017 market share.

Stephanie began as a PCMag reporter in May 2012. She moved to New York City from Frederick, Md., where she worked for four years as a multimedia reporter at the second-largest daily newspaper in Maryland. She interned at Baltimore magazine and graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (in the town of Indiana, in the state of Pennsylvania) with a degree in journalism and mass communications.
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